Here’s what I want you to know before I tell you anything about the movie business: the Morongo Basin went four years without a movie theater. When Cinema 6 in Yucca Valley closed during the pandemic, seeing a film on a big screen, indoors, meant an hour in the car, each way, down the hill. For four years, one of the most basic pieces of community life — a dark, cool room where strangers sit together and watch the same story — simply didn’t exist up here.
It does now. Paradigm Cinemas, at 56401 Twentynine Palms Highway, reopened the building in August 2024. Four screens, first-run films, in the same spot that’s been showing movies since it opened as the Valley Twin in 1982.
The story of how it came back is worth knowing: the new owner found the shuttered theater through a post on an online forum. A woman who had tried to take it over herself, couldn’t, and wanted someone out there to know that this community had a good theater and no one to run it. Someone read that post and drove out to see for himself. That’s the whole origin story. Somebody asked, and somebody answered.
Which brings me to summer. The heat that’s arriving now in Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, Morongo Valley, Twentynine Palms, and more brutally down in the low desert is not a punchline here. It shapes when we walk our dogs, when we leave the house, what our electric bills look like.
A movie theater in the summer is one of the few public places where anyone, for the price of a ticket, can spend two hours in real air conditioning, in the dark, with other people. That has always been part of what theaters are for. The summer blockbuster exists because of the heat; air-conditioned movie houses were selling escape from it decades before most homes had any. In the desert, that original purpose never stopped being true.
So go. And if you’re down the hill, the low desert has kept its screens too. The Mary Pickford in Cathedral City, now Mary Pickford is D’Place, runs first-run films across fourteen auditoriums with recliners, house-made ice cream, and $6.95 Tuesdays.
In downtown Palm Springs, the old Regal on Tahquitz Canyon has become Festival Theaters, independently run and committed to being the valley’s home for independent, international, and LGBTQ+ cinema, with $7 Tuesdays of its own. Its general manager has called it the last shot at a true arthouse theater in the desert. He’s not wrong, and that’s exactly the kind of place that survives because people show up.
Now, what’s actually playing, because this is the part I find genuinely hopeful.
The box office is healthy again. Domestic ticket sales through the end of May were running 11.3 percent ahead of last year. But the more important story is who is driving that recovery, because it is not who you’d expect.
Start with the biggest film of the year that isn’t a sequel or franchise. Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, stars Ryan Gosling as a middle school teacher who wakes up alone in space with no memory of how he got there. It opened March 20 to $80.6 million domestically and $140.9 million worldwide. It has since grossed $683.5 million worldwide against a $200 million budget, making it the fourth highest-grossing film of 2026.
Rotten Tomatoes calls it a “near-miraculous fusion of smarts and heart.” What made it connect isn’t complicated: it’s a film about competence, friendship, and altruism. A scientist solves impossible problems, forms an unlikely bond with an alien, and tries to save everyone. In a moment when the prevailing blockbuster mood has been destruction and franchise obligation, audiences turned out in huge numbers for a movie that just wanted to do good in the universe. That means something.
Then there’s the other side of the recovery: horror built on almost nothing.
Backrooms, directed by twenty-one-year-old Kane Parsons, who built his audience making short horror videos on YouTube, was co-financed by A24 and Chernin Entertainment for roughly $10 million. It opened May 29 to $81.4 million domestically and $118 million worldwide, more than tripling A24’s previous opening weekend record. It has since crossed $331 million worldwide, becoming the studio’s highest-grossing film ever and making Parsons the youngest filmmaker to top the domestic box office.
Obsession, from director Curry Barker, 26 years old and similarly YouTube-born, was produced for $750,000, then acquired by Focus Features for $15 million after a bidding war at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has now crossed $371 million worldwide, the biggest film in Focus Features’ history, and its fourth weekend gross set an all-time record for the biggest fourth weekend ever for a horror film. Word of mouth did that. People telling other people: you have to see this in a theater.
Meanwhile, The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened May 1 and has passed $678 million worldwide, more than any Marvel film released last year earned. Read that again. A twenty-years-later sequel about a fashion editor outgrossed the entire 2025 superhero slate.
The franchise machine that dominated theaters for fifteen years is no longer the sure thing. What’s working instead: a space epic about a scientist who befriends an alien and saves the world through sheer curiosity; horror built by young filmmakers for next to nothing; and stories about adults, made with care. Audiences are choosing. That’s new, and it matters.
Here is what all of it adds up to for us in July. The movies are in the most interesting place they’ve been in years. The room they play in is the coolest one in town. And ours stayed dark for four years before somebody brought it back. Buy the ticket. Buy the popcorn. Keep the lights on at Paradigm so the dark room stays open for all of us.
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Grateful that Sad Trombone celebrates movie going and glad it elicited histories! We go whenever there's a movie that's even remotely independent or for adults. (We are also crazed enough to take in movies at the Palms Springs Film Festival every year.) We've almost always had a good experience at the Paradigm, although JTJ got cranky when house lights came up during the Sinners credits. And...team Project Hail Mary here. Amaze amaze amaze!
first time reading sad trombone column! excellent will now seek it out. viva cinema will get off my ass and go support local theaters!